


All the Days That Might Have Been

by RustingWithYou



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-10-06 08:55:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17342405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RustingWithYou/pseuds/RustingWithYou
Summary: There is a place where space and time are folded in just the right way that, if you look through it, you can see all the choices you made and how they might have been if you made them differently.The Doctor's done enough running.Time to look back.





	1. Prelude - Reflection

There is a place where space and time are weakened in just the right way, just enough that if you look through, you see the choices you made and what they could have been.

The official name, for those that care about that sort of thing, is a retro-temporal schism. For the rest of us, it is called the Reflection, or, for those with a darker taste, the Last Stop - because not many people come back from what they see. All the ways their life could have been better and worse - it drives most people insane. Even getting there requires an extremely good ship with an extremely gifted pilot to avoid being torn apart by the two black holes that sit equidistant from the Reflection.

The ship that hovered before the Reflection now was better than extremely good - and the pilot wasn't bad either. They were an ageless being, one who had seen so much death and suffering that they had to wonder. What might have happened? What could have been?  
  
The traveler sits, legs dangling from an old, battered wooden box into the void. They lost their coat at some point, but that didn't matter. When you live long enough, you lose everything at some point.

Of course, you find it again too. Why else bother to go on?

The Reflection is beautiful to see, even if it hurts to look at. An ordinary piece of space, but somehow it's been stretched and polished in such a way that when the traveler looks into it, they see themself staring back out.

_ Funny _ , they think as they prepare for the Last Stop.

_ I didn't think it would actually be a reflection. _

A smile flits across their face, so quickly that if they weren't looking in a mirror they might not even have noticed it was there.

They stand up, and step into the Reflection and look back on too many lives to count, too many friends lost and enough adventures to fill every book ever written.

It begins and they see themself, so long ago they have to struggle to remember the face they wore.

As they are pulled into the vision, they smile again, as one thought crosses their mind.

_ Of course. _

_ Where else would we start? _


	2. In A Moment of Weakness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A caveman.  
> A rock.  
> And a lifetime of regret.

For the briefest of moments, the Doctor is in two places at once. They are standing in the doorway of their TARDIS, staring into the Reflection – and they are on Earth, in the year 102,000 B.C, and fleeing from the Tribe of Gum. The Doctor is young now, with long white hair and about to make the choice that made them who they are.

  
One of the primitives – the Doctor can’t remember his name – has fallen and the Doctor remembers their justification.

_He’s slowing us down._

_We have to get back to the TARDIS quickly._

_The others won’t leave him – those teachers of Susan’s. Irritating, both of them._

_Unless…_

_No. No, no, no._

_It’s the only way._

_I’m not a murderer._

_If I don’t, we all die._

_Isn’t one life lost better than all of us?_

_If we die and leave the TARDIS here the Web of Time could be destabilised._

_That’s just an excuse._

_Can I kill someone, even a primitive?_

_Koschei would tell you to do it._

_Koschei isn’t here._

_Rassilon, I wish they were._

 

The Doctor remembers it happening now, how just for a moment they were convinced. The Doctor took the rock and prepared to kill the man – but Ian saw them, and that moment of hesitation was enough for them to realise that of course they wouldn’t do it, they would never do it.

But the Doctor saw themself from lifetimes ago, and saw what was coming.

Ian turns, seeing the Doctor, his hands trembling as they grip the rock.

“What are you doing?”

The Reflection shimmers, and time changes.

The Doctor remembers the rush of terror at what they had almost done, and looks down on themself.

The Doctor – no, that name doesn’t belong to him anymore – lifts the rock and brings it down.

There is a crack of breaking bone, and Ian grabs the foolish young Time Lord, pulling him away from the dead man. The schoolteacher’s face is twisted with anger, and he hits the Time Lord, sending him falling. Barbara and Susan turn, and hurry over. Ian hits the Doctor again, and Barbara grabs him, pulling him back while Susan – Dear, dear Susan – rushes to her grandfather’s side.

Barbara speaks first, holding Ian back.

“Ian! What are you doing?”

Ian points, as he tries to hit the Doctor again.

“Look at him! Look what he did! He murdered Za!”

Barbara’s eyes widen as she sees the caveman’s broken skull and the bloody rock, and the Doctor’s face turned away in shame. Susan steps away from her grandfather, eyes wide as tears begin to well up.

“G-grandfather?”

The Doctor feels a retort in his throat, about how it was necessary, and how they had to get back to the TARDIS before it was too late, but somehow looking into his granddaughter’s eyes all the words dry up.

They walk back to the ship in silence, but he feels three pairs of accusing eyes all the way there.

When they finally open those doors, Barbara turns to the Doctor and asks, no, demands that he take them home.

He tries to explain the ship is difficult to pilot, but for once it takes him exactly where he wants to go.

Barbara goes first, then Ian. His parting words shouldn’t have hurt, but they did.

“You really aren’t human, are you?”

Finally, the Doctor stands over the console, head bowed as he tries to find somewhere else. Where can he and Susan go? Where will they be safe?

He’s so wrapped in his thoughts he doesn’t even notice Susan following her teachers out the door. By the time he realises, he thinks about following her but remembers that look of horror on her face and knows there’s no way he’ll ever see her again.

So the Doctor does what they do best.

He leaves.

  
With that wheezing, groaning sound, the TARDIS takes a lonely old man away, to a place where no one ever asks him about the name Susan Foreman.

He doesn’t set foot in the TARDIS again – it reminds him too much of his own failures.

For nearly seventy years, the Doctor lives in a shack on an island in an alien sea, and every grueling day he reminds himself he deserves this. When he leaves, he does so not because he has forgiven himself, but because he wants so desperately to forget. He travels, seeing sights he only read about, but alone they serve no purpose at all.

It is nearly one hundred years since he murdered the human – Za, Za, his name was Za – when the Time Lords find him.

He doesn’t try and resist.

They bring him to the Panopticon, where he is held on trial for theft of a TARDIS and interference in the Web of Time. He pleads guilty to all charges, and is sentenced to imprisonment – where, he cannot say. Shada perhaps, or one of the other great prisons for temporal criminals.

He is there for another sixty-three years before his body finally gives up.

He feels the regeneration coming, knows it’s coming, and it takes all the strength he has to refuse.

As the Doctor dies, he thinks of Susan and wonders if he hadn’t used the rock, would she still be here? Would things have been different?

But there’s no way to know, and he dies with tears in his eyes and a memory of all those he loved.

His body is taken from the prison, as is Gallifreyan law.

His family don’t want any part of it, and the body is to be incinerated – until another Time Lord takes custody.

They never give their name, but they take the body out of the Capitol to a barn in the Drylands, where they dig a grave and lay their oldest friend to rest.

And then they leave, because of course they do, because what is left for them here?

 

Susan Foreman is eighty-seven years old when she hears that sound that’s haunted her all her days. Ian and Barbara are gone now, but she still has photographs of them on her mantelpiece in the old house that sits where there was once a junkyard. She isn’t sure what to think. Is it the Time Lords, here to take her back to Gallifrey? Is it Grandfather, trying to make amends?

She doesn’t know what she’d do if it was him. When she left, it was with tears in her eyes vowing she would never be like him.

She had graduated from Coal Hill School with the highest marks in recent history, and gained a scholarship to a dozen of the world’s finest universities. She studied hard, until one day she became the only thing that she ever could have been.

She became a Doctor, and her discoveries and advances in science changed Earth’s history. But the person who emerges from the Type 45 TARDIS parked on Susan Foreman’s doorstep isn’t one she recognises, not until she looks into their eyes.

They explain that her grandfather has died, and that if she wishes she can return to Gallifrey. She says that Earth is her home, but invites the stranger in for tea.

The two of them sit for a while, talking about her grandfather and the things he did, both good and terrible. When the time comes to leave, Susan asks her grandfather’s old friend if they can make a stop first – after all, her grandfather never did take her to the markets of Akhaten. The stranger agrees – after all, as long as they return to Gallifrey eventually the Time Lords should be forgiving. Why not go the long way round?

Koschei and Susan Foreman step out into the universe, and billions of years later the Doctor closes their eyes and cries.

They forgot how much it hurt. To see their oldest friend and granddaughter, as they might have lived.

Perhaps this way was better. Without the Doctor in it, maybe some of them would have lived.

There has to be more.

This can’t be the end.

The Doctor grits their teeth and whispers to themself “Again.”

They step forward into the Reflection.


	3. Casualties of War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A name is a promise, but not one we can always keep.

The Reflection shudders and twists, and the Doctor leaves the empty house for somewhere else.

Another world now, another life – the one with the bowtie and the recorder – the second? Maybe. Still so young, so innocent, even now, even after everything.

The planet of the War Lords is a strange one – altered to resemble Earth, so well it even fooled the Doctor. A planet filled with soldiers taken from history using primitive time travel devices – what had that fool Magnus named them? SIDRATs? How typical.

In the center of the War Lords’ base, the Doctor was confronted with a choice – he couldn’t get all the soldiers home, and nor could the War Lords. There was only one group of people who could, and if he called them then everything would be lost.

Jamie and Zoe would surely be returned to their own time zones, and the Doctor would almost certainly be executed or imprisoned. Back on Gallifrey, that planet of utter boredom. Better to die than to spend eternity in a stale and stagnant beauracracy, never dreaming of the world beyond the burnt-orange sky.

But it’s one thing to say it’s better to die than go home.

It’s another to sentence thousands to death.

The Doctor still has the cards of a hypercube in his pocket – a last resort for a time much like this. If he did make one, send it to Gallifrey – could he escape? Could any of them escape?

No.

And so the Doctor makes a choice – if the wrong one.

Time shifts, and the Doctor lies.

“I’ve sent for help,” he tells the soldiers, never meeting their eyes. “Someone will come to return you home soon.”

And with that, the Doctor leaves the planet and the whole sordid affair behind.

What happened to the soldiers, he never learned. Maybe they made a life on that strange planet, even if all they knew was lost forever.

Maybe they fought the War Lords and found their own transport home.

Maybe they all died, centuries from home on a forgotten world.

The Doctor never checked. He already knew the answer. A disadvantage of time travel. So the trio continued travelling, laughing and having adventures, and never thinking about the one time when the Doctor broke the promise he made so long ago because if he stopped and thought he might just go back after all.

They travelled space and time, and the adventures they had were incredible. They fought an ancient god in the floodwaters of the Nile and the half-built pyramids, and they stopped the Cybermen from overwhelming Earth in the 43rd century. They saved people across the universe, from Daleks and Sontarans and too many others to name.

On Gallifrey, the Time Lords continued to wonder – “Whatever happened to that young fool who stole a faulty old TARDIS?”

But they never did find out as that same faulty TARDIS spun and flew throughout existence, running and running and all the while the Doctor thought of the brave men and women he’d condemned on that faraway planet he never learned the name of.

They travelled for years and years and eventually both Jamie and Zoe left until it was just how it always seemed to end up – a lonely man in an empty box.

He found alias and alias, but from the day they left he never again called hiimself ‘The Doctor’.

He didn’t deserve that any more.

So the people of Alkonost VII were saved from the Kalgrassian Plague by a strange, grey-haired traveller calling himself John Smith, and the residents of Gao in the 15th century were able to stop the rising Silurians thanks to a stranger calling himself Theta Sigma, but the legend of ‘The Doctor’ faded, until not even the man who had called himself that remembered it.

As he travelled alone for century after century, the lie that had saved his life always looming over that empty console room, the nameless traveller began to grow tired. People always made their own problems. Even when a time-travelling hero showed up to defeat the Daleks or the Cybermen or whatever monster menaced them this week, they would always find something new to fight over.

So the traveller tried something new. He stopped, and he stayed. And when the people of some insignificant mining colony prevented the Trahl-Kesh Invasion thanks to a man with no name, he stayed and helped them.

He taught science and medicine more advanced than the human race had known, and in time they came to treat him as a leader and he led wisely for decades and decades – because the truth of the universe was that people were too weak to lead themselves.

And after centuries of rule, when what had once been a mining colony was a thriving city and the center of an empire, someone finally asked their ruler what his name was.

For a moment, he considered telling them the truth. Then, when that passed, he went through all his names and disguises before he settled finally on one that seemed honest.

He called himself the Master, because he couldn’t be a Doctor any more.

And master he was, for thousands of years at the center of his empire. And when the revolutionaries came to his door, he didn’t fight them. Why would he? He deserved this.

He was taken to the main square of the Great City where he had reigned from, before a crowd of a thousand species and he saw just what his reign had become.

And the man who had been the Doctor was shot once in the head before a cheering crowd of thousands.

The body was left there, and it wasn’t until a day later that the corpse shone with light and a new man walked away into the celebrations of the dead tyrant.

He took a dusty blue phone box and left again, not knowing what to do any more. Could he save people? Could he rule them again?

One day he came to Earth and met a man with a black beard who had heard of him by reputation – the tyrant who conquered the universe.

The new man asked who he was, and Koschei laughed and hugged his dearest friend, before telling him angrily that he’d called himself ‘The Master’ first.

The two of them sat and talked about the places they’d been and the things they’d done since Gallifrey until the new man broke down and confessed what he’d done on the planet of the War Lords that had haunted him so much he built an empire just to try and appease his conscience.

And Koschei told him it was all right, and that they could fix it together.

So the man who wasn’t a Doctor any more took his TARDIS and returned to the planet of the War Lords, not a moment after he’d left and sent a signal in a hypercube to the Time Lords.

They came instantaneously, as of course they did. Time travel makes that easy.

But this time, the trial was interrupted as a rogue TARDIS managed to break into the courtroom and the two Time Lords laughed and whooped as they broke the Transduction Barrier and fled as they’d dreamed of doing.

And for a moment the new man thought that he could be the Doctor again.

After travelling, they went home to Gallifrey and stood against the High Council, and a new generation of Gallifreyans followed them – students and outlanders who had heard the legends of the two Time Lords who dared to spit in the eye of the Council and intervene in the universe.

And their revolution was short and bloody and brutal and glorious. And when it was over, the two of them sat in the ruins of Gallifrey, surrounded by broken hearts and broken bodies and decreed no more would the Time Lords sit watching where they could fix the universe.

And there was a new empire, with Gallifrey at its center and two rulers where there had once been a council, and was it good or terrible? It is impossible to say, but as the Doctor watched from the end of the universe they wondered if maybe, just maybe, this version of the universe was better than the alternative.

They shook their head. There had to be more than that. There must be more than that.

They stepped forward into the Reflection for the third time, hoping they would see something, anything else, anything that didn’t end in tears or anger or regret.


	4. Conscientious Objector

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That was murder. An entire race of sentient beings, and the Brigadier just wiped them out.  
> How could anyone stand by and let that happen?

Time shook around the Reflection, and a new world took form.

It was the next incarnation now, the one with the velvet jacket and the white hair, who worked for UNIT. He was standing by Liz, trying to get that dear old car to run again, talking about – ah. The Silurians. The Doctor was hopeful, for the first time in a long while. He’d managed to negotiate. If he could just get his equipment, he could revive the Silurians and get them to live in peace. He knew humanity could be better than they seemed. Maybe, if it was all like this, exile to Earth wouldn’t be that bad.

When the explosion comes, he doesn’t just hear it or see the smoke.

That’s part of being a Time Lord, you see. Even if you can’t process it consciously, you feel every possible iteration of reality. When an event occurs that changes the timeline greatly, you _feel_ it, right in your hearts – the turn of the universe shifting.

The thing that Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart did that day at Wenley Moor was one of those. The Doctor felt it, both there on the moor and adrift at the Last Stop, a whole branch of possibilities snapped off. A world where humans and Silurians shared the planet in peace, crumbling to ash before his eyes.

“That was murder.”

At the end, the Doctor remembered the impulse, to strike out and bid UNIT farewell – these bloodthirsty humans never changed. They hadn’t done it, of course, and they were glad – in spite of everything, the Brigadier had been a good friend, and UNIT had become something better.

Time shifted again, and the Doctor’s hands tightened to fists. He climbed into Bessie and turned, driving away from the moor. Liz reached out, but didn’t stop him. She just stood there, watching him drive away as the smoke filled her eyes.

The Doctor didn’t return to UNIT the next day, or the day after. It took three weeks for him to arrive, and when he did he wasn’t as furious as Liz had thought he would be. He almost seemed like his old self, but when he spoke to the Brigadier it was with steel in his voice. He took the TARDIS and went, and Liz was left as Chief Scientific Advisor.

The Doctor found a junkyard on Totters’ Lane, and continued trying to break his exile. He experimented on the TARDIS for years, and UNIT tried their best to defend the Earth in his absence. Not to say he gave up, of course. He helped deal with alien threats, but in his own way. Sometimes UNIT would arrive to find an alien ship gone after having been repaired, or a group of bloodthirsty warriors convinced no prey would be found on Earth and sometimes, just sometimes, the TARDIS communicator would ring in a message from Liz Shaw and the Doctor would help to solve a problem UNIT could do nothing about.

But a strange man living in a junkyard attracts attention, and nearly four years into his exile the Doctor was greeted by a man in a suit who politely informed him that he represented the Torchwood Institute, and that the Doctor needed to come with him immediately.

When the Doctor refused, he was taken by force into the back of a van and taken to an old manor house where he would one day fight a werewolf.

Torchwood.

He was kept there as a prisoner, and told he would help to restore the British Empire. He refused, and was told he would change his mind lest a certain Miss Shaw met with an accident.

And so the Doctor came to work for Torchwood, teaching them advanced science to protect his friend. It took decades, and the secrets gleaned from the Doctor brought Great Britain to supremacy.

It took him nearly fifty years to escape, building a makeshift sonic screwdriver from scrap brought to him by the Institute. He reached his TARDIS, but of course, it didn’t work. He was still an exile.

He couldn’t use his TARDIS, but he understood the basics of temporal mechanics, and a TARDIS contained all the parts one needs to build a rudimentary time travel device.

Before Torchwood broke in, he used the device, projecting himself far enough into the future that he could hopefully acquire more advanced temporal technology and undo all the terrible things that had happened.

But by the year 5113, the world was different. The Earth Empire, as it had become known, was a tyrannical and xenophobic regime, and they had not perfected time travel. It took the Doctor many more years in the future to acquire a Vortex Manipulator, using it to send himself back to Totters’ Lane and warn himself of Torchwood’s approach.

Even as the Doctor blinked from existence, the original version was able to prepare and to speak to the Torchwood agent from a place of safety. He told the Institute that he would not work with them, no matter what they did, and that he would contact UNIT if they didn’t leave.

The agent told him he had cut ties with UNIT, and the Doctor, clever as he was, came up with a clever story involving the junkyard, an undercover operation, and several handlers who were monitoring the situation.

The agent left to confirm, and the Doctor escaped. A fugitive in a yellow car with a blue box is a difficult role to play, but he managed it, avoiding UNIT, Torchwood and anyone else who would use him for years and years, staying in dozens of locales, ranging from a ruined Sea Devil city beneath the North Sea to a hidden chamber beneath the Tower of London.

But no one runs forever, not even the Doctor. He watched history pass by, and even did his part to help now and then, but without his aid a great number of the alien incidents in the late twentieth century caused much more harm than they would have.

And when the day came, when the Doctor’s exile was finally lifted, he bid the Earth goodbye without a second thought. Humans were all the same (although he thought of all the noble people who had travelled with him and wondered if ‘all’ was really a fair assessment) and he was done giving them chances.

He wandered the universe for a while, but it was… empty, somehow. By condemning the human race for the Brigadier’s actions, he had allowed himself to see the worst of the universe, and every species he met he judged and found wanting.

He left Gallifrey because he wanted to see the wonder of time and space, but now it just seemed hollow.

And so he returned, with the quiet wheezing of a faulty Type 40 as he landed in the outlands of Gallifrey.

He lived on the Capitol for many thousands of years, eventually seeking political office because it was the only place anything _interesting_ happened on Gallifrey.

By the end of his eighth lifetime, he sat on the High Council, and by his eleventh he had served a term as Lord President. And yet he still felt empty, even as he led Gallifrey from the seat of utmost power, and so he retired to spend his twelfth life in the outlands, living off the land and shunning technology altogether.

It was simple, and he felt that it was right. But even then something was missing, and so he left again, his final face going out into the universe and seeing what he’d missed.

And too late, he saw the beauty of the universe, and the good that went alongside the evil. He saw a noble soldier who made a terrible choice that haunted him for decades and a brave young scientist who tried so hard to live up to her predecessor’s legacy.

And too late, he realised what a fool he’d been – not to condemn the Brigadier, but to think so little of humanity and of the universe as a whole. He’d let himself be convinced that the universe wasn’t worth saving, but that wasn’t it at all.

Part of him wanted to see them one last time, but he shook his head and simply sat down by the console, resting his head against it.

And as the Doctor closed his eyes for the last time, he wished he could have done more.

 

They emerged from the Reflection with tired eyes, thinking with mirth on a life as a politician. 

Maybe that was enough - no. They hadn't found what they were looking for yet.

They sighed, and stepped back in, on to the next life and the next mistake.


	5. Do I Have the Right?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Daleks are monsters, a race of genocidal psychopaths.  
> Surely it's worth anything to destroy them.  
> After all, what could be worse?

The Reflection twisted, and the Doctor moved on to the next life.

A new face now, an old favourite – the one with the funny scarf and the big hair. He sits in a room on an all too familiar planet – gone now, of course. Wires in hands, and a choice to make – to destroy the Daleks forever, wipe them from existence.

“Do I have the right?” he asked himself, and the Doctor realised they still didn’t know the answer.

As he sat he thought on all the evil the Daleks had wrought, all the terror they had created and wondered if he could justify it. All the innocent people who would die against all those who would live if the Daleks were destroyed. If the Daleks were… exterminated.

The Doctor remembered there in that uncertainty – and right before the choice was made, the young soldier had burst in and told him that the leaders were voting on the continuation of the project. Hope had blossomed like a glorious flame, but it still hadn’t been enough. Davros had betrayed the Kaled leaders and the Daleks had been created anyway. Set back, yes, but created.

But this wasn’t reality, just a reflection. And in this reflection, the Doctor made one crucial choice just a moment earlier.

Three and a half seconds before the young soldier entered the room, the Doctor touched the wires together and was engulfed in light.

The last thought to cross his mind was that he really went a bit overboard on the explosives.

But he struggled back to life, of course. A Time Lord always does, even when they might not want to. A new face and a new body – but this time the madness of regeneration seemed to recede, as if out of respect.

A Time Lord always comes back.

Humans aren’t so lucky.

The Doctor looked down and saw Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan, lying in the rubble of the Kaled city.

He returned to the Time Lords and reported his mission complete. They gave him back his TARDIS – though it felt awfully empty now.

He took two bodies back to Earth, where they were posthumously awarded the highest honour UNIT could give.

And then he left, because he is the Doctor and that’s what he does.

The universe he saw became a different one. The Earth advanced far more rapidly without the Dalek invasions of the 22nd century, and thousands of other civilisations were able to survive where once they were exterminated.

Even if the loss of his dear friends seared at the Doctor’s hearts, he found comfort in the fact that he had made the universe a better place.

But out of the Daleks’ evil had come great good, once. Alliances that would have been formed never came to be, and wars started that had never been fought.

The human race fought war after war against hostile powers who in the old universe had been their close allies. The path that the Earth Alliance took was one that more and more often ended in war, until a human empire ruled over a half dozen galaxies.

For the Doctor, it hurt. Humanity was his favourite species, and to see them become conquerors and despots hurt as much as it ever did. But the Daleks were gone, and that was what mattered. He had to believe that that was what mattered. If it wasn’t, then two brave and noble young people had given their lives for nothing.

So the Doctor kept travelling, back in humanity’s past, where he could pretend that nothing had ever really happened. That the human race was still on track to be, in the end, kind.

But then he received a communication from the Time Lords, and a mission.

Predictions said that at current rates of development, the universe would be under the control of humanity within eight thousand years. The development of the human species was to be retroactively prevented.

The Doctor refused, of course. He argued the good of humankind, that they didn’t deserve to die for a few bad apples, and that he would have no part in this mission.

The Time Lords told him that he would not interfere with the measures they would take.

Which, the Doctor being the Doctor, was the first thing that he did.

He went back to the distant past of Earth, where the primitive apes that would become humans were to be eliminated. But by the time he arrived, it was to a battleground.

The human race had become aware of efforts to prevent its developments, and it acted to protect itself.

The Celestial Intervention Agency force that arrived in Earth’s distant past were met with overwhelming force and forced to retreat.

And it was then that for the Doctor, his worst fear came to pass as Earth and Gallifrey went to war.

At first humanity was outgunned horribly. While they defended their past, they were incapable of directly striking at Gallifrey. But if there’s one thing the Doctor always knew mankind could do, it was adapt. In the hundred and first year of the war, the human race developed its most advanced temporal craft yet – a timeship capable of keeping pace with a TARDIS.

The Time War raged, humans against Time Lords, and the only question that the elites of Gallifrey asked was which side the Doctor was on.

Truth be told, not even he knew that one. The Time Lords were his people – but in a way humanity was too. He’d spent more time with humans than he ever had on Gallifrey – so much that some among the Time Lords had jokingly called him ‘half human’.

So the Doctor did the only thing he could, and ran.

He ran from Gallifreyan Battle-TARDISes and human timeships, as the War expanded across the Vortex. Both sides found allies, and the War raged and raged like a flame that threatened to burn creation down.

While the Doctor ran, both sides fought. The Time Lords made pacts with any and all historical enemies of humanity – Draconians, Cybermen and any other race that had challenged the human empire. As for humanity, they had hundreds of ally species within their empire – Silurians, Zygons, Ood and too many more to name.

By the end, it would be easier to name the races that weren’t involved in the War.

The primitive species never knew that it raged, but their history was rewritten around them.

The higher species watched in horror as the universe was torn apart. The Eternals retreated from reality, and the Guardians turned their backs in shame.

By the ten thousandth year of the War, no one could say they knew their own name, and it was said you shouldn’t look in a mirror for too long lest your face change around you. And it was when the War was at its height, humans and Time Lords fighting to the point where no one on either side was really sure why, that a sound was heard in the deepest vaults of Gallifrey that brought hope and fear to both sides of the War.

A blue box appeared, and with it it brought an ending to things.

What was the weapon the Doctor took from the vault?

The Reflection didn’t show – all it showed was the aftermath.

Ships floating in the void that had never had a crew, crumbling to ashes.

Worlds obliterated by war suddenly finding themselves whole again.

And two barren planets once named Earth and Gallifrey drifted in their orbits.

And the Doctor had peace.

And the Doctor looked out over a new universe and decided ‘No More.’

 

They reached to the console and pulled a lever, and the last TARDIS in the universe was filled with a brilliant light.

 

There is a strange anomaly, floating on the western edge of Mutter’s Spiral.

A blue wooden box spinning in the void.

Nothing strange about it, inside or out – just an ordinary wooden box, drifting between the stars.

The Reflection ended, and the Doctor screamed now, sadness giving way to rage.

There was always a War, always a battle – nothing could be different. Everything ended the same.

They charged into the Reflection with reckless abandon this time, daring the universe to show them what came next.


End file.
